Lableak truther loses $100k in his own debate
protagonistfuture.substack.com
protagonistfuture.substack.com
I thought this was still up in the air.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/26/covid-virus-li...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisadellatto/2023/02/26/timel...
FBI Chief Christopher Wray: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64806903
Former CDC Chief Robert Redfield: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64891745
WMD in Iraq was also "low confidence" intel.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-covid-lab-leak-deception-an...
This article is part of what I like to call the narrative media. You decide what the facts are and don't give a damn about reality -- because that's what keeps your readers coming back for more.
Why does anybody’s public or private beliefs at that point in time matter? Politics have always existed in science but generally over time the truth wins.
>Why does anybody’s public or private beliefs at that point in time matter?
If someone demonstrated a pattern of lying in their own favor, isn't that important?
I also strongly suspect a lot of lab leak proponents and/or anti-vaxxers are knowingly lying as well. But still it doesn’t change the underlying facts.
>It’s bad for their personal reputations that they were caught lying, but their lies don’t change the underlying facts.
If your job is to advise the country about how to conduct research and how to deal with a pandemic, it's not just reputational damage. The lockdowns virtually destroyed the economy and cost more than WW2. Fauci lied about not doing gain of function research and the media has his back.
Honestly I think I’d prefer if it were a lab leak, since that seems easier to prevent in the future, sadly for me I think the overwhelming evidence points otherwise. A quest for the truth isn’t real if the truth can only be one thing.
But look I’m not going to convince you, your faith is your own and I hope it serves you well.
I would disagree, all the evidence we have right now supporting zoonosis is circumstantial. The evidence being a mapping of early cases to around the market but given the shortcomings of this early evidence it's hard to rule out sampling bias: https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/a5102da1-9b47-4e11-...
But so far we have not found an intermediate host nor any closely related viruses in any animals yet. By contrast for the two previous spillovers SARS and MERS they not only identified an intermediate host, but they have found many closely related viruses in animals due to the fact the virus is circulating and thus branching off into many variants. Just take a look at the phylogenetic trees of MERS: https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12985-... and SARS-CoV-1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1212604/
Prior to the debate I thought it was likely a specimen leak (couldn't be an engineered virus, it used previously unknown, and inefficient, means to enter human cells, also to much randomness in its DNA). The debate was a schooling in statistics (which is sad cause I have an applied statistics bachelor), I know believe it was zoonotic. I don't really care either way now.
Does that mean that it definitely was a lab leak? No.
Does it mean that even suggesting that it might've been a lab leak is some kind of "truther" bullshit? Also no.
If I find zebra dung in my garden in Northern Minnesota, and Bob's Zebra Farm is just down the road, it is in no sense a "conspiracy theory" to suggest that one of Bob's zebras might have escaped, and making that suggestion does not make you a "truther" (God, I hate that word... it's just ad hominem nonsense).
Now, maybe someone else in the neighborhood has a zebra, or maybe a traveling circus passed through and one of their zebras escaped, or maybe there's yet another explanation.
But, you know, I'm still going to count Bob as a prime suspect, no matter how much Bob and Bob's buddies try to make me look ridiculous for even making the suggestion.
The premise of this article as someone a source of truth is a complete farce. The "judgement" is essentially a bet that an "Israeli investor and poker player named Saar Wilf" has come up with some sort of algorithm to prove a lab leak origin. WHICH DOES NOT EXAMINE ACTUAL EVIDENCE OR DOES ANY REPORTING INTO THE LAB LEAK. The Computer Scientist and Biologist he asked to be his judges disagreed with him.
There is compelling evidence that a lab leak occurred. Lab leaks have occurred in the past. This isn't science fiction or paranoia. Real Scientists in Wuhan were sounding the alarm in 2018 that there was dangerous scientific research being taken with lax safety regulations. There were at least two labs working in Wuhan on coronaviruses. The best evidence that it originated with raccoon dogs is more of a hunch than proof, and even Chinese health officials said the report about raccoon dogs rule out lab leak entirely.
If you are at all interested, I'd highly recommend the BBC podcast, Fever: The Hunt for Covid's Origin. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001mdfw/episodes/player
Here's a recent survey of virologists and infectious disease epidemiologists, with a smaller proportion of biosafety/biosecurity professionals and evolutionary geneticists.
> the goal of this survey was to conduct a rigorous, geographically diverse, and anonymous survey of scientific experts regarding the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic
https://gcrinstitute.org/papers/069_covid-origin.pdf
They support the natural origin theory at roughly 4 to 1, not sure if you'd count that as a large scientific consensus but it's in the ballpark.
I don't have a horse in this race, but this feels very amateurish.
Then the conclusion outlines the desperation after losing the debate, & all dignity is lost
1) Tighten up all infectious disease labs.
AND
2) Enforce higher global food handling standards (wet markets, etc.)
AND
3) Improve indoor air filtration, anywhere that more than 3 people regularly gather.
As far as I can tell, we've done none of these things. Instead it's a political football.
If the cause of COVID had nothing to do with infectious disease labs, food standards, or air filtration, then those three action items would be irrelevant.
If the cause of COVID was acute poisoning combined with a global, coordinated psychological operation, then you've got bigger fish to fry.
Instead, let's focus on the Illuminati or something? What poisoning caused all our ERs to overflow during the pandemic?
The fact that none of the (seemingly non-controversial) action items are being addressed should tell you something about how our leaders think.
Instead, they're proposing plans for the next pandemic which amount to more authoritarian surveillance and control.
> What poisoning caused all our ERs to overflow during the pandemic?
I suggest you look into it. ERs weren't all overflowing. https://www.woodhouse76.com/p/new-york-city-er-visits-plumme...
https://old.reddit.com/r/nursing/search?q=covid+overflow&sor...
Not so, because the first two will reduce the rate at which new pandemics emerge.
I'm not so sure about the value of the third, as while the will reduce the rate at which any specific airborne infection spreads, that just means the next pandemic needs the set of traits which make it survive longer while airborne e.g. what the common cold already has.
> If the cause of COVID was acute poisoning combined with a global, coordinated psychological operation, then you've got bigger fish to fry.
Indeed, but both bio labs and wet markets were known to be potential risks before hand, the former being why we even have a biohazard warning icon and why biosafety levels are defined. Those risks still exist, the wet markets just need to end completely, while for the bio labs it's always good to have people imagining various ways things could go wrong in order to make them not actually go wrong outside of our imagination.
I agree that those items are worth doing for other reasons. But I also question whether pandemics even operate in the way that we've been conditioned to believe.
> Those risks still exist, the wet markets just need to end completely, while for the bio labs it's always good to have people imagining various ways things could go wrong in order to make them not actually go wrong outside of our imagination.
The fact that biolabs haven't been regulated at all (in fact, even the notion of investigating biolab safety has become some sort of partisan issue) should be a huge clue that the COVID response has been a political operation.
???
They were already heavily regulated before, and still are now. And that includes in China, where we don't get to talk much about "partisan" issues owing their government treating any discussion of their own imperfection as some kind of foreign dissent attempt.
A huge group of nominally "smart" people have lost their collective minds around the time this pandemic broke out and I've yet to understand what their motivation is.
Everything is black and white; either you're with us or against us; either you're an intellectual who enthusiastically agrees with everything the "authorities" say without asking questions, or you're a nutjob who deserves to be banished from society. How did we get here?
I've seen simplistic explanations that refer to the state of post-2016 US politics, but this behavior extends far outside the US.
This is a stark contrast with his "Real Truth" mathematical model which are made by Gods, are based on unmanipulated inputs, are unbiased and apolitical...
This whole premise where two junior academics come some conclusion and then the debate is apparently over, just lol when there's still lots of debate around this topic by serious professors in an actually scientific arena, many of them who've kept their beliefs secret because of not rocking the boat (another leak).
This new "liberal" or radical centrist but authoritarian line of thinking where you just smear opponents as truthers or conspiracy people and then ignore all the leaks and data, the money, the networks of power - what was once known as classic journalism, is a bit dystopian in my eyes, because people apparently aren't sceptical about the state / security state / big corp and the nexuses between them anymore and what was "local paper level research journalism" is often today seen as "you are a conspiracy lunatic" - i think much of this has to do with stuff like Q, and it makes you wonder how "grassroots" (astroturfing) that movement really was, because of how conveniently it has destroyed the reputation of anyone asking non state approved questions.
Am I understanding this correctly? Are you suggesting that there was a meta-conspiracy that started the Q conspiracy theory to destroy the reputation of politically undesirable people?
I'm not concluding anything, but sceptical speculation about state-, military pretexts, or corporate action like this didn't use to be as fringe as it is today, where it will quickly earn you an "enemy actor", "russia bot", "china bot", or "enemy of the state" badge - the oldest play in the book in my opinion, echoing mccarthyism, ww2 state sponsored xenophobia or similar strategies.
Since Bernais et. al. wrote about propaganda and the mouldable psyche of the masses for state power and profit in the 1920's it's like these perspectives have been forgotten.
In my view this is how business and politics have always worked until the modern "everything is just chaos and randomness" discourse conveniently became the paradigm - and conveniently that is for the ownership classes - even rather tame marxist historians or a plurality of historiographies outside of the tiny anglosphere bubble would laugh at this perspective and say the state and the upper classes have always and will always conspire in class warfare, propaganda and PR to spin, mobilise and smokescreen resource political and judicial strategies that people wouldn't support organically via PR playbooks, campaigning and event driven political action.
Hmmm. Has this been translated from Chinese?
All I'm getting is there was a debate, and the judges (who were totally non-partisan of course) chose the 'scientific' zoonotic origin theory over the 'charlatan' lab-leak theory.
There's really no concrete evidence either way, but there is no evidence at all for zoonotic origin other than that's the usual way things happen, and lots of circumstantial evidence for a lab-leak, plus a good deal of suspicious secrecy on the part of people involved in that research.